Karen Jacobs sat in her office with a sense of growing anger and
apprehension. She was reviewing the proposal from the "P-5"
team and was more appalled than inspired. The team had been launched in
accordance with HR's emphasis on self-managed teams and had sent in
several excellent initial reports and proposals. Things had gotten off
to such a refreshing start that she had given the team total freedom to
work in an unsupervised manner. The team had picked a pair of recent
hires as team leaders, ostensibly because of their newness to the
company and their fresh ideas.

Karen's concern began when the team had asked for an extension
because of scheduling problems and lack of needed information. She
wished now that she had monitored the work more closely but reasoned
that the purpose of self-managed teams was to remove the influence of
the so called "oppressive management hierarchy" and free the
team to work on its own.

The final report before her was of mixed quality; some of the ideas
were quite good but others were mediocre. Unfortunately, areas she had
specifically stressed were totally inadequate or missing altogether. She
had been informed confidentially that Finance wasn't really
committed and had reluctantly sent only a junior representative to work
with the team.

Karen was due to present the work to the Management Committee in
five days. It would take four days just to corral the finance people, do
the projections, finish the work and clean up the recommendations.

Somebody on the team had done exemplary work, but others had
dropped the ball. Karen knew that the Management Committee would
certainly hold her accountable for the report, but what was she to do
about the team and its work? Two of the members were from her department
and it seemed unfair to stick them with the entire failure.

Four months of team meetings had transpired and she was on the
firing line. As she asked her secretary to cancel all meetings for the
next three days, Karen wondered who was accountable for this mess.

Ask any manager about "accountability" and he or she will
tell you that it's a great thing to have. Ask them how to get it,
however, and the long answers begin. The answers become even more vague
when you consider that many organizations are moving to self-managed and
cross functional teams and semi-autonomous work groups.

Accountability often gets relegated to the bin of "antiquated
thinking" and is considered a part of the relics of "old
hierarchical management methodology". But the problem refuses to go
away because when things go wrong (or just as importantly, well) who
gets the blame (or credit)?

Is there really a problem with accountability? Everyone is
committed, motivated, interested and eager to contribute to the
company's success. Isn't that better than the old system of
bureaucracy where blame, passing the buck and "cya" were the
norm?

Quite frankly, one cannot avoid the issues surrounding
accountability. You either have accountability or you don't. Many
companies think they do ... but don't.

Take Karen's situation. Can she as a manager really hold a
team accountable for a piece of work? You think you know what it means
to hold an individual accountable, but does the word have the same
meaning when applied to a team or unit? For example, have you ever heard
of an entire team being fired, or promoted for that matter?

Certainly, bonuses get handed out but usually everyone receives the
same amount. Does that really reflect the differential contributions
from the team members? Most times is does not. And what about the
high-capability workers the next time around? The grapevine probably
knows who worked hard and contributed, but that's not much of a
basis for compensation.

Should we scrap all our teams and working units, even whole
departments, and have everyone working on his or her own? Obviously not.
Working groups, teams, departments, task forces and other collective
entities are often able to accomplish infinitely more than individuals.
But much of their potential is wasted unless harnessed through
appropriate structure and monitored by means of individual
accountability.

The Necessary Conditions

for Accountability

Management theorist Elliott Jaques points out that if A is to hold
B accountable for the work output of C, then four fundamental conditions
must be present. If they are not, accountability cannot exist and no
amount of "group thinking" will make it so.

Let's take manager A who wants to hold her subordinate unit
manager B accountable for the work produced by the units members, C. A
must grant the following conditions to B:

1. The right to veto any forced assignment

of unit members.

A manager cannot force a subordinate to have team or unit members
whom she simply cannot work with or feels are incapable of doing the
work. After discussion and negotiation, B must agree that she has team
members who can get the job done. They may not form the "perfect
union" but she must get a minimally acceptable configuration in
order to be held accountable for their work output.

2. The right to decide tasks and

hand out work assignments.

If B is to be held accountable, then she must be empowered to
decide who delegates the work and controls overall direction. Obviously,
A provides the larger context and ensures that the work is performed
within company policy, but B has to have the authority to decide what
the work assignments are and who does what. This means no
"micro-managing" from A. Otherwise, it becomes A's
project and therefore, A's accountability.

3. The right to make final judgment

on performance review and

raises.

B must have the authority to evaluate the personal effectiveness of
the Cs and make decisions regarding merit raises within their pay scale
and/or award bonuses for performance. In other words, while B cannot
promote someone to a new rank (that would presumably be A's
decision), she should hand out rewards and control raises/bonuses within
her working unit. If A overrides her judgment, B loses accountability
for the unit's performance (not to mention credibility and
respect).

4. The right to initiate, with due

process, the removal of employees

from the unit.

If some employees do not work out, cannot be coached into
acceptable performance or do not comply with company rules, B must have
the authority to begin due process of removing them from her unit. Note
well that this does not necessarily mean firing the employees, but to
begin the process of placing them elsewhere in the company. If B is
insistent, then should A keep these employees there against B's
will? If so, one of the primary conditions of accountability will have
been violated.

Karen might have avoided this personally stressful and
organizationally wasteful experience by handling the above-described
situation as follows:

1. Never let the team choose its own leader. In the same way that a
team (as a group) cannot be held accountable for a piece of work, they
cannot be held accountable for selecting their own leader. Karen should
have chosen the team leader, using her judgment and knowledge of the
company and the talent available. This does not mean she should not ask
for volunteers or avoid participation in the decision making process. In
short, the team leader is accountable to her; she needs to make the
decision.

2. Following selection, Karen should have established deadlines and
helped the team leader form the unit, including obtaining the required
resources from the other departments. Her clout was needed to get the
people and work output from Finance; it's hopeless for a junior
manager (B) to "demand" that someone attend team meetings or
perform the required work. Likewise, the team leader should never have
accepted the assignment unless she was given the necessary resources to
accomplish the work.

3. Only one person can ever be assigned the ultimate accountability
for a unit or team. Co-leaders sound nice, but do you really promote (or
demote) them as a "team" or do you deal with them in their
career advancements as individuals? Co-leadership is often a way of
lessening the anxiety of true accountability and Karen should have
emphasized this with her team leader when setting up the team. The
formula is simple - one team (or unit), one accountable person.

4. Adequately evaluating the efforts and outputs of individual team
members is a difficult and almost completely ignored problem. if a team
is composed of organizational equals, it may be difficult or virtually
impossible for a team leader to make realistic judgments about the team
members' quality of output. The situation is simpler if a senior
manager heads up a team of more junior contributors because the senior
manager is capable of realistically evaluating the differential
contributions of the members.

An organizationally equal team leader discussing the allegedly poor
work output of a team member with the member's direct superior is
fraught with difficulty and should be avoided by having the comments and
information relayed to the team leader's boss (Karen in this case).
This boss is then accountable for how she uses this information and must
make a managerial judgment about how to relay the information to the
member's boss.

Comments about participation, missed deadlines or attendance are
easily observed and can be passed on as factual information to the team
leader's boss. Ruling on the quality of output is a much more
difficult task and requires the perspective of a more senior (and more
capable) manager. Again, it is simpler in the direct unit because Karen
clearly has the authority and hopefully the capability of making the
judgment. With teams, especially carelessly formulated ones, this issue
can be insidiously destructive.

5. Appropriate review meetings are important for the work of any
team or unit. If Karen determines that things are not going well or that
her choice in a team leader was incorrect, she still has time to make
adjustments or coach the leader in the appropriate direction.

6. If the team's final work is unsatisfactory, Karen now has a
clear knowledge of who was in charge and can decide what to do next. The
team leader is clearly accountable; on this point there can be no doubt.
She may seek to understand the situation or coach, but the
accountability is unambiguous.

We are verging on an accountability crisis today that goes beyond
work teams such as Karen's. Whether flat or hierarchical, Fortune
500 or just beginning, companies often lack a clear and understandable
structure that makes managers and subordinates accountable for their
work. Accountability is a fundamental principle of business success -
when accountability is clear, productivity and efficiency follow. And
that's really what good managers are all shooting for.

How to Get Accountability

for Team Output

For a team leader to be held accountable for the work of the team,
he or she must have:

1. The right to veto any member of

the team.

2. The right to decide on work

assignments in the team and to

hand out tasks and deadlines.

3. The right to relay information

and comments back to the team

leader's manager (not the team

member's manager) about the

participation and contribution of

the team members.

4. The right to initiate (with due

process) the removal of any

member of the team.

Donald Brookes is director of the Canadian Regional Office of The
Harding Consulting Group located in Toronto, Ontario. The North American management consulting firm also has regional offices in New York, Miami
and Houston.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Canadian Institute of Management
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.